[Eric Merrell, Afterimage] In this painting I'm relying primarily on color to create form and dimensionality; the color here is intense but not very dark (and the intensity is created by relationships to other colors, not straight out of the tube color, which would be unrelated and garish). The round volumes of the persimmons can be felt even without much of a shadow, and the table surface has depth, warmer at the bottom/front edge receding to slightly cooler behind the leaves. Color has abilities above and beyond value.

"Value and composition do the work and color gets the credit." (Anonymous)

The implication that value and composition do the heavy lifting while color is extraneous reveals the extent to which this anonymous quote misunderstands what value is, and confuses through its oversimplification. Given how often this misleading maxim is printed in art magazines and blogs, the confusion is understandable. When we talk about value, we are indirectly talking about the lightness or darkness of color. There is no value without color. If you get the color right, the value will be right.

This is not an easy concept. Color is specific. Color communicates lightness and darkness, but also quality of light, mood, atmosphere, emotion, spacial qualities, season, age, time of day, geography, temperature, surface quality, and more. Color can encapsulate everything in each related spot. Can we communicate an idea with just value? Sure. Value is one of the more prominent features of color, but value can only convey light or dark. And value isn’t always necessary for a successful painting. There are other contrasts. Color is poetry.

Value, the relative lightness or darkness of color, is an intrinsic part of color. When we remove a good deal of the information found in color - hue, saturation, temperature, etc. - we are left with value. Lights and darks. What is little understood is that color contains the information found in value. Get the color right.

“There’s only one road to a full rendering, a full translation: color.” (Paul Cézanne)

A LITTLE HISTORY

The idea of the importance of value over color comes from the academies and historically, from ideas about what color is. Mankind has for centuries had myriad and changing ways of understanding color. The Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras held an early color theory that involved the Earth, the moon, the planets, and their revolutions. Fellow philosopher and poet Empedocles claimed that rays of visual flame left our eyes like a lantern, while simultaneously, objects in the world continually emitted 'effluences.' These effluences existed in different and various sizes; when they corresponded to similar shapes of pores in the eye, we saw color. Building on Empedocles’ ideas, Plato postulated that our ray of vision is white and the opposite is black; red and ‘radiant’ completed his system of four colors. Aristotle expanded this further to echo the transition of day into night: white, yellow, red, violet, green, blue, black.

Pigments were often hard to come by; some were also quite expensive. Many colors we have available today didn’t exist a few hundred years ago; others were fugitive, meaning the color wasn’t lightfast and would fade over time.

Because of those ideas about color and limitations of what was actually possible on a palette, for a long time artists began their paintings by working first in value. Removing the complexities of color from the early stages of a painting simplified thisapproach (grisaille in artist terminology) and allowed form to be achieved quickly as the artist worked in gray tones. The artist subsequently added color, either transparently by glazing or opaquely by repainting it directly on top.

Color is secondary and superficial, not integral to this way of working. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, a Neo-Classicist and one of the most visible defenders of the academic approach, had this to say about it:

"Color adds ornament to a painting; but it is nothing but the handmaiden, because all it does is to render more agreeable the true perfections of the art. Rubens and Van Dyck can be pleasing at first sight, but they are deceptive; they are from the poor school of colorists, the school of deception. Never use bright colors, they are anti-historic. It is better to fall into gray than to into bright colors."

Ingres' Neo-Classicism was rivaled in the French Salons by the Romantics, led by Eugène Delacroix, who commented:

"The enemy of all painting is gray."

Students of Ingres were criticized for a lack of understanding color and light; his star pupil Théodore Chassériau eventually defected to the romantic school of Delacroix. As Charles Baudelaire observed:

“the students of M. Ingres have very uselessly avoided any semblance of color; they believe or pretend to believe that they are not needed in painting.”

Robert Henri on his teacher William Bouguereau at the Académie Julian in Paris:

”I think I am nearer right than ever before…It is a matter of color. Bouguereau is not a colorist either in combining color or reproducing it. His color is harmonious and in some cases very fine but he is never a colorist and as for reproduction of color, he never does that. It is always the same waxy, angel-like color - just a little insipid - so from this I am not inclined to put the same confidence in his criticisms on color as in the other branches.”

Art was forever changed by the insights of Sir Isaac Newton (in particular, his prism experiment showed that white light contains all colors) and Michel Eugène Chevreul (his concept of simultaneous contrast resulted from his time at the Gobelins Manufactory in Paris). As would be seen in work by the French Impressionists as well as the Pointillists, artists expanded their palettes with brighter and stronger colors to accommodate this new knowledge. Claude Monet was particularly concerned with using lightfast colors and in reducing the oil binder content in his paints, as oils such as linseed can lead to yellowing. Part of the revolution that the Impressionists demonstrated to the world was that 'local color’ doesn’t exist - everything is color and light.

Though mentored by Camille Pissarro andfriends with the Impressionists, PaulCézanne didn’t consider himself a part of that group. In an 1866 letter toPissarro, he related some of the nuance of color:

You are quite right to speak of gray, that alone reigns in nature, but it’s frighteningly difficult to capture.”

Later in his life, Cézanne commented to his friend Joachim Gasquet:

“You’re not a painter as long as you haven’t painted grays. Gray is the enemy of all painting, said Delacroix. No, you’re not a painter until you’ve painted a gray.”

Cézanne also had this incredible insight long before science confirmed it for us:

“Color is the place where our brain and the universe exist. That’s why color appears so entirely dramatic, to true painters.”

The advent of new groups such as Synthetism and Cloissonism, which were created in reaction to the Impressionists, were built up around various color theories. Paul Gauguin was the main proponent behind the former, while Émile Bernard and Louis Anquetin are credited with the latter. Working alongside Gauguin in Brittany, Bernard also admired and corresponded with VincentVan Gogh and Cézanne. Theory often took center stage is Bernard’s work - with Cloissonism, he desired to simplify nature and reduce all perceived colors into the seven main colors seen in a prism. Indeed, Cézanne complained that Bernard theorized too much.

A disciple of Cézanne, Pierre Bonnard later commented on color’s role in a painting:

"Color does not add a pleasant quality to design - it reinforces it."

This rivalry about the role and application of color goes back hundreds of years and has its roots in our earliest ideas about color. St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), a French abbot and integral part of the Cistercian order, agreed with a strongly held assertion that color was purely matter, and that it should be avoided because it disguised and masked the holy and pure. Accordingly, St. Bernard's churches contained little or no color, tolerating none of the deceptions that (as St. Bernard believed) color would present to lead the faithful away from religious thought. A contemporary of St. Bernard, Abbot Suger (1081-1151), took the opposite view. He believed that color was light, and since light was immaterial and came from God, color was good. Anticipating Newton's discoveries by a few centuries, Suger's abbey at St. Denis reflected that concept: filled with stained glass, gold, gems, and enamel, all color represented and glorified God.

The original painting and the painting with color removed to show only relative lights/darks.

Detail: In areas such as this leaf, the green is intensely different from the surrounding orange. When reduced to just elements of value, the leaf disappears almost entirely. To make anything visible here with only value we would have to increase value contrast where there isn’t any.

I isolated some of the color spots from their roles in the painting for the sake of comparison.

Value, Hue, Chroma, Saturation, Temperature, Intensity: these are all words describing qualities of color; how light or how dark it is, how strong of a red, how blue that green is. We've come up with this terminology to better communicate our ideas about color to one another, because color is a really difficult subject to talk about. We tend to think value is more important because it’s much easier to understand and measure than color. As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein explains:

If we are asked, what do the words red, blue, black, white mean, we can, of course, immediately point to things which have these colors. But our ability to explain the meaning of these words goes no further.

Empedocles’ ideas were modified over the centuries. Chevreul added his insights to a long list of philosophers, scientists, artists, and thinkers. Newton’s ideas were hugely influential. We know now that color is energy: the universe is full of an immense amount of electromagnetic waves bouncing around. Our eyes and ears, in concert with our brain, interpret some of that energy into 'sight' and 'sound.' We can only perceive a very small range of these waves, what we know as visible light. Take away the light, and you aren't left with shades of gray; you have darkness: the absence of light.

A landscape under the light of a full moon is not monochromatic, a limited amount of color can still be seen - as a starting point, go outside at night and look around - the sky will be a different color than the ground. Even the near darkness of a quarter moon is not black and white. In these situations where light is reduced almost entirely, we can still see color.

Detail of the color spots isolated and their location in the painting.

The same image converted to grayscale.

Isolated spots in gray scale and color.

In the spots above, variety in the color version is fairly distinct albeit subtle - some are a little more yellow, some a little more blue or red. Taken into gray scale, the broad difference between 12 and 13 becomes nearly nonexistent; the subtle qualities between 5, 6, and 7 disappear. #9 is the edge on the persimmon as it turns away from us, seemingly a 'cool' color in the painting; isolated, it loses its power. If you take half of the gray scale version of spot 5 and overlay it on spot 11 (see offset spots above), they're indistinguishable. But color-wise they serve very specific roles in the painting: 5 is maybe a little warmer, part of a rounded form of persimmon, while 11 resides on a flat surface.

THE BASICS

Value is a helpful, albeit limited, tool. Here’s why. Sure, we can achieve form through value. But let’s say you’re painting that simple sphere above. If you’re looking at and painting an actual sphere on a table in front of you, you’ll notice the cast shadow (x) close to the sphere will probably be darker but will lighten somewhat as it moves away to the left. Not only will it get lighter, but the color will change. If you’re working only in black and white paint, the only adjustment you can make is to go lighter or darker. You can’t make it redder or bluer or greener or warmer or cooler. With a limited palette you have only very limited color adjustments possible, and quite likely not what you’re seeing.

You’ll notice the same thing happens in other areas - the color will shift along the top edge (y), as well as within the darker core shadow (z). The spot marked by (a) is the part of the sphere that is physically closest to us, the viewer. Every other part of the sphere is receding away from us. The spot where the (z) is placed within the core shadow is the part of the core shadow that is closest to us. As the dark line of the core shadow recedes up and over the sphere away from us, the value may or may not change, but the color most definitely will. Otherwise the far top edge of the core shadow will read as being in the same space as (z).

(Although we represent the edge of the sphere by a line in a drawing, in reality there is no line. The line represents a form receding away from us until we can no longer see the form, and something else, such as the background, becomes visible. Lines are abstractions representing the edges of forms.)

The reason mountains look bluish at a distance is because of atmospheric perspective - the amount of atmosphere between us and the object we’re looking at affects the amount/quality of light (i.e. color) that can pass through (also the reason why sunsets appear warmer/reddish). In our little sphere still life we don’t have the vast distance of a faraway mountain, but we still have small amounts of atmosphere to account for. Because of atmospheric perspective, we know that everything that recedes away from us gets lighter (value shift) and cooler (color and/or temperature shift). (The opposite of darker/warmer makes things come closer.) For the sphere to sit like a volume in space and convey a sense of light, we need all of our color relationships to reflect these basic ideas.

Value can only get us part of the way there. If the color changes but the value stays the same, we have no ability with value to create dimension. Value can’t move laterally, it can only go lighter or darker. That area remains flat.

When Charles Hawthorne says the following, he is including all of color’s latent possibilities in each spot the artist makes:

“Painting is just getting one spot of color in relation to another spot…. Let color make form, do not make form and Color it.”

Robert Henri does the same, emphasizing the emotional aspect of making a mark:

“Whatever you feel or think, your exact state at the exact moment of your brush touching the canvas is in some way registered in that stroke.”

When you see and paint a single spot of color in relation to others, that single spot can convey light, depth, emotion, form, temperature, and more, all in one mark. It’s sounds easy summed up that way, but it’s so incredibly difficult.

A very common misconception among painters is that if a value is 'correct' in a painting, the color can be somewhat arbitrary and still work.Value is a component of color - Color is the whole package. Value doesn’t actually exist outside of color. Pure black and white is a reduction of reality. When we talk about value, we are indirectly talking about the lightness or darkness of color. If a color is right, the value will also be right.

Each color spot must relate to every other color. Color is specific. Don't disregard color in favor of value.

[Eric Merrell, Self-Portrait at Sunset] Color has infinitely more possibilities than value. Although here we see a great variety of color, compare them to the value scale in the middle - a large portion of it is mid-range, with nothing extremely dark or light. If this were painted in grayscale we might be tempted to use extremes of value to convey contrast because that’s the only ability value has. The orange hat, blue-green background over the shoulder on the left side, and shirt in sunlight are very different as far as color, but are about the same value-wise. We only see the value at right when all of the color has been stripped away. If the color is right, the value will be right. Color is specific. Don’t disregard color in favor of value.

[Eric Merrell, A Flash Through the Gloom] The orange persimmon piece above has lots of little color shifts in a similar color scheme. In this painting and the self-portrait I’m relying on bigger color shifts within a close value range. The yucca in the lower foreground is just about the same value as the first and second hills, but the color is dramatically different. Although painted at twilight, there is nothing truly dark in the painting, and the moon isn’t just a white cutout.

[Eric Merrell, Distant and Dreamlike (The Salton Sea)] Samples of the lightest spot (x) and the darkest spot (y) along the value scale. A very high key painting that needs color to work - with only gray tones, that distance of a few miles across the Sea flattens out to the picture plane. Value can’t move laterally within the same value - color can.

TENS OF MILLIONS OF COLORS

The world is not merely black, white, and gray. We live in a world packed full of colors - of tens of millions of colors. Black and white as an art form can be beautiful, as it is in photography and printmaking - but it’s a distillation of reality as far as painting goes. Learning to understand value and composition is obviously very necessary for learning how to paint, but the road to color continues way beyond value. As artists we’re attempting to translate the tens of millions of color we can see - perceived light - into the much smaller range of pigment. The strongest palette of artist’s pigments will always fall short of representing our perceptions, but I think it’s far better to have a bigger keyboard on which to play.

(Limited palettes are a great tool for beginning artists to use. You can learn a great deal about mixing, relating, creating harmonies, etc. without having to conduct an entire orchestra. However, after painting a while with a limited palette you’ll start to see colors that a limited palette cannot achieve.)

Antony Anderson, the first art critic for the L.A. Times, had an interesting insight about systems of color:

“To arrange color by rule is to make it lifeless and without meaning, to destroy its power of exciting emotion, and to reduce it to a mechanical balancing of color areas.”

Discussions of color tend to become dogmatic and formulaic (color wheels, opposites, etc,) because we want to it fit into a system of measurement like perspective or anatomy, but color resists that kind of organization because it is a personal experience that happens in our brains. (Value is another measurable system.) The amazing part of color to me is that, although its such a personal thing, if we get the relationships to work, others will understand it, even and especially if they have no artistic background. If we limit ourselves to relying primarily on value contrasts, we will tend to paint only when value is visibly present and quite often come up with pedestrian color. Value is just color with the difficulty removed.

Two more from Hawthorne:

“If you are not going to get a thrill, how can you give someone else one?”

“The ring, the call, the surprise, the shock that you have out-of-doors – be always looking for the unexpected in nature, do not settle to a formula.”

If we accept a full range of color, possibilities open up: we can paint in the middle of the day, on overcast days, or in any number of other situations - even at night. The world remains three-dimensional, regardless of the light or time of day.

Provincetown artist Henry Hensche sums it up best this way:

“Accuracy in color, it must be noted, is as important as accuracy in drawing.”

Don't waste your money and time on color theory books*; most just regurgitate theories without presenting any new insights. Color charts are helpful in understanding a pigment’s potential ability, but they aren’t going to help you understand how color creates the sensation of light. There is no easy way to good color. It’s hard, toiling work. Don't worry about explaining your color; people always want to know why a certain color exists (i.e. they want you to present some science as to why your tree is red or that face is violet). That color exists because you saw it and put it on canvas.

Learn to paint by learning to see. Paint outdoors often. Get excited. Be bold with color. Paint what you see. Paint everything in relation. Excellence in color is rare**, but despite its degree of difficulty, it is achievable to those willing to work hard enough (years and years, and then more years) to understand it. Refuse mediocrity. Strive to move beyond predictable color and the formulas of art workshops. Avoid prettiness and search for beautiful color - you will surprise even yourself.

The point is this: Value is important, but don’t let that contrast become the only one you use.

*For further reading, these classics will never get old. They deal with color not in terms of theory but in terms of seeing, which is what painting is.

Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

Sergei Bongart, …Touched By The Gods

Mary N. Balcomb, Sergei Bongart

Charles Hawthorne, Hawthorne on Painting

Henry Hensche, Hensche on Painting

Henry Hensche, The Art of Seeing and Painting

**There are so many artists with the ability to draw well, art history is full of them - but how many can you name that saw great color? I mean color that conveys light, that resonates. Not tube color, not garish color. Color that you remember. Chances are you’d be very hard-pressed to name more than ten.